ALBERT EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF INFIDELITY

As he detailed in his letters, Einstein over the years developed a complicated view of male-female relationships.

In
a June 1953 letter, Albert Einstein tried to console a female friend
who had discovered that her husband was having an affair, by advising
her that she should resist taking it personally. Cheating, he explained,
was the norm among humans.

“I am sure you know that
most men (as well as quite a number of women) are not monogamously
endowed by nature,” he wrote, according to a translation from the
original German published decades later. “Nature will come through even
stronger if convention and circumstances are putting resistances in the
way of the individual.”

It was a subject that the
great physicist knew something about from personal experience. Einstein
himself had been unfaithful to his first wife, Mileva Maric, and
eventually left her to marry his mistress, Elsa Einstein, who was also
his cousin. After divorcing Mileva and marrying Elsa, he soon resumed
having dalliances with numerous other women as well.

"You
have to keep in mind that in Europe at the time, for a pursued,
charismatic man, his behavior wasn't so unusual," Harvard physicist and
science historian Gerald Holton told Discover magazine in 2006.What
was a bit more extraordinary, though, was Einstein’s frankness about his
wandering attentions, and his deft construction of a nuanced moral code
into which infidelity could fit comfortably. As he detailed in his
letters, Einstein over the years had developed a complicated view of
male-female relationships.

Einstein wasn’t that fond
of matrimony to begin with. He and his first wife Mileva had lived
together and conceived a child before their marriage. As Einstein
biographer Walter Isaacson notes, after the couple separated, Einstein
wasn’t in any rush to legally finalize their split so that he could
marry Elsa, his lover, either. As he wrote in a 1915 letter: “The
attempts to force me into marriage come from my cousin’s parents and is
mainly attributable to vanity, though moral prejudice, which is still
very much alive in the old generation, plays a part.”

Eventually,
Einstein did relent, and obtained a divorce from Mileva so that he
could say the vows with his cousin. According to Isaacson, Einstein told
his soon-to-be ex-wife that he was concerned that the reputation of
Elsa’s two grown daughters would be harmed by gossip about their
mother’s relationship with Einstein.

Instead, Einstein seemed to prefer what we would call today free love.

After
marrying Elsa, he started a passionate affair with his secretary, Betty
Neumann, and in letters, even fantasized about having her live with him
and Elsa in a big house. (When his lover dismissed the idea, he
admitted that she had more appreciation “for the difficulties of
triangular geometry than I.”)

In a letter that
Einstein wrote to Elsa, who’d discovered that he’d had a fling with one
of her friends, Berlin socialite Ethel Michanowski, Einstein explained
that “one should do what one enjoys, and won’t harm anyone else.”

Einstein
simply saw his flings as non-serious affairs that didn’t interfere with
his feelings for his spouse. “Out of all the women, I am in fact
attached only to Mrs. L. who is absolutely harmless and decent, and even
with this there is no danger to the divine world order,” he wrote in a
letter in the 1930s to his second wife Elsa’s daughter Margot, whom he
relied upon to keep Elsa from becoming angry about it all. (According to
biographer Isaacson, “Mrs. L” was an Austrian woman, Margarete Lebach,
with whom Einstein had an extramarital affair.)

Moreover,
Einstein told his friend whose husband was unfaithful that people had a
natural desire to have affairs, and it didn’t do any good for them to
resist the urge to do so. When a man forces himself to remain
monogamous, he observed, “it is a bitter fruit for everyone involved.”But
that human proclivity came with a burden, Einstein wrote. It usually
resulted in a man being caught between two women who would become
hostile to one another because of him. “For a well-meaning person, there
is no satisfactory solution to this problem,” he wrote.

It’s
unclear whether Einstein’s “well-meaning” referred to the unfaithful
husband or the wronged wife. But for both, as Einstein saw it, it wasn’t
the infidelity itself that was a test of character, but how each of
them behaved toward each other as a result. If a husband treated his
spouse decently in other ways, she should tolerate his adultery. “You
should be able to respond to his sins with a smile, and not make a case
of war out of it,” he wrote.

In Einstein’s view,
decency included discretion about one’s affairs—even though Einstein
himself wasn’t particularly discreet about his liaisons. In his letter
to Elsa about his affair with Ethel Michanowski, he lauded “Mrs. M”
because she hadn’t hurt Elsa by telling her about the relationship. “She
didn’t tell you a word,” Einstein wrote. “Isn’t that irreproachable?”

Einstein
clearly enjoyed the company of women, but his casual attitude about
relationships may have had something to do with his own discomfort with
deep feelings. “When confronted with the emotional needs of others,”
Isaacson wrote in his biography, “Einstein tended to retreat into the
objectivity of his science.”

At
the same time, the great scientist’s aversion to monogamy may have had
exacted a cost. Upon the death of his best friend from college, Michele
Besso, Einstein told Besso’s son, “What I admire in your father is that,
for his whole life, he stayed with only one woman. That is a project in
which I grossly failed, twice.”